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Comments Oh GOODNESS... Please lose the google ads!!!! Is the revenue from the google adsense program going to the peace elements wiki -- or are other people benefitting from them? They are very intrusive here... i say that as someone who does internet ads professionally...The skyscraper ad someone is inserting here is meant to be used along the right or left margin of a web page, NOT at the top at all. The ad should not be a full skyscraper size AND it would work better as a leaderboard AND would be best at the bottom of the page. ---- here's something we are in total agreement on, joyce. ;) all i can say is ... they irritate the heck out of me ... mess with all the formating we do to make the pages pleasing ... and i know i am going to make note of them and ensure i do my very best to boycott anything advertised here in this obtrusive and distracting way. if they need be here at all ... they need to be at the bottom of the page ... where they do not detract from the very content of the wiki. -ts- I like WikiCities a great deal. -ts- ---- lob ... i like the use of the table for links at the bottom have been getting reports from folks who have a hard time navigating the site as we have so many links ... and it is not always apparent where they lead & is sometimes difficult to find them ... have trouble myself finding my way about. ;) i think the table will help with the essential links. good one.-ts- 07:32, 9 Jan 2005 (PST) too many links not enough content - all we need is time 82.69.58.117 :Big smile... So, under Special Pages, there is a link to "Uncagegorized categories" ... Wonder what that really means? -- joyce lol! ... yes ... i wondered the same thing. still waiting for something to show up there. ;) -ts- :It just means categories that are not themselves in a category. See this test category for an example. Angela 10:35, 10 Jan 2005 (PST) tried to put this in the anger management for peace warriors Help! Dependent Arising - The Curious Nature Of Problems The difficulty that underlies the entire attempt to achieve personal happiness through self-centred goals relates to the whole nature of what it is to have a `problem'. A problem does not exist in splendid isolation as a concrete fact in the real world. Instead, problems arise in dependence on our definition of happiness. If, for example, we have set our heart on a particular person or object, anything that interferes with the attainment of that goal will obviously be labelled `a problem'. We are not angry with a romantic rival simply because he or she exists, but because he or she threatens to take away what we believe will make us happy - he or she is therefore `a problem'. In response, we may become irate, frustrated, jealous, furiously angry and even violent. If, on the other hand, we do not believe that a particular person is an important source of happiness, then the person who might otherwise have been a rival is no longer an obstacle - the problem has literally ceased to exist in the same way that a rainbow disappears when a cloud obscures the sun. The point is that this is true of all problems. Belief in happiness through the satisfaction of self-centred desires automatically creates conditions in which thousands of problem `rainbows' can arise. As we identify a must-have partner, job, car, house, level of success, we thereby instantly generate vast numbers of `problems' in relation to them. If we realise that none of these things actually can give rise to lasting happiness - that they tie us to an endlessly rotating wheel of suffering, diminishing discomfort (pleasure), and arising discomfort - then our problems begin to diminish in number and intensity. To the extent that we lose faith in the power of desired objects to provide happiness, we dismantle the conditions that lead us to define certain events as `problems'. And just this, according to the world's major spiritual traditions, is a state of genuine peace and happiness. How can we test this remarkable claim? We might argue, after all, that a life without desire would be a life of unrelenting boredom. But, on reflection, we can realise that boredom is precisely what we feel when we are blocked from satisfying a desire - from talking to a prospective partner chatting to our friends at the next table, from moving to a better job in some fantastic place. Boredom is not a condition without desire; it is a condition in which desire is both present and frustrated. So how can we experience a condition, perhaps only temporarily, in which our normal focus on selfish concerns giving rise to `problems' is temporarily `switched off' or diverted in a way that tests the truth of the proposition being made here? The answer is that we can `switch off' our normal focus on our own problems and happiness by focusing on the problems and happiness of someone else. Victor Frankl described this brilliantly. In a situation of deep despair on a work team in a frozen death camp, a casual comment from a fellow prisoner caused Frankl to remember the face of his wife who was also imprisoned. He writes that his mind imagined her face "with an uncanny acuteness": "Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation... in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfilment." (Frankl, op.cit., p.57) By focusing concern away from our own welfare, a loving and compassionate mind has the power to annihilate problems even in the most extreme conditions. Problems exist in dependence on a self-centred focus, and so feelings of love or compassion free the mind from problems. Psychologists often tell us that much modern depression results from people comparing themselves to others who are better off. As Montesquieu wrote: "If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are." It also makes sense, then, that deep reflection on the infinitely worse suffering of others - a standard practice in many cultures - gives rise to a stable feeling of contentment and well-being. Thus one Buddhist meditation recommends: "On seeing a wretched man, unlucky, unfortunate, in every way a fit object for compassion, unsightly, reduced to utter misery with hands and feet cut off, sitting in the shelter for the helpless with a pot placed before him, with a mass of maggots oozing from his arms and legs, and moaning, compassion should be felt for him in this way: `This being has indeed been reduced to misery; if only he could be freed from his suffering!'" Again, our problems are not concrete realities - they literally shrink in our minds when set alongside, even imaginatively, the far worse sufferings of others. Science is beginning to support the idea that compassion of this kind is indeed a powerful antidote to personal unhappiness. On September 14, the New York Times reported from the University of Wisconsin, where Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, is currently studying brain activity found in Buddhist monks meditating on compassion. Davidson says: "It's something they do every day, and they have special exercises where they envision negative events, something that causes anger or irritability, and then transform it and infuse it with an antidote, which is compassion. They say they are able to do it just like that." (Stephen S. Hall `Is Buddhism Good for Your Health?', The New York Times, September 14, 2003) Davidson's research has previously found that people who have high levels of brain activity in the left prefrontal cortex of the brain simultaneously report positive, happy states of mind, such as zeal, enthusiasm, joy, vigour and mental buoyancy. On the other hand, Davidson found that high levels of activity in a parallel site on the other side of the brain - in the right prefrontal areas - correlate with reports of distressing emotions such as sadness, anxiety and worry. Experiments on one monk, a "geshe", generated remarkable results. Davidson reports: "Something very interesting and exciting emerged from this. We recorded the brain activity of the geshe and were able to compare his brain activity to the other individuals who participated in experiments in my laboratory over the last couple of years... The geshe had the most extreme positive value happiness out of the entire hundred and seventy-five that we had ever tested at that point." (Daniel Goleman, Disturbing Emotions - And How We Can Overcome Them, Bloomsbury, 2003, p.339) Davidson describes the geshe as "an outlier" on the graph - his reading was "three standard deviations to the left", far beyond the rest of the bell curve for positive emotion and happiness. In the New York Times article describing these results, journalist Stephen Hall comments that "the fact that the brain can learn, adapt and molecularly restructure itself in response to experience and training suggests that meditation may leave a biological residue in the brain". Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard neuroscientist comments: "This fits into the whole neuroscience literature of expertise where taxi drivers are studied for their spatial memory and concert musicians are studied for their sense of pitch. If you do something, anything, even play Ping-Pong, for 20 years, eight hours a day, there's going to be something in your brain that's different from someone who didn't do that. It's just got to be." Conclusion - Motivation For Dissent Possible options for all who ask "What should I do?" are clear. The first thing we can do is reflect on our own experience of life in considering the possibility that the self-centred pursuit of pleasurable experiences does not deliver on its promises. Forever placing our needs, our problems, at the centre of our focus in this way ensures that they always seem enormous. By focusing with compassion and love on the (often far worse) problems of others, we can reduce our perception of the importance and severity of our own problems, even in the most difficult circumstances. We can consider, then, that compassionate thoughts and actions - working to relieve the suffering and increase the happiness of others - can be a powerful path, not an obstacle, to our own personal happiness; that these can act as an antidote to the catastrophic problems caused precisely +by+ our single-minded attempts to make just ourselves happy. The problem, then, is not that we already have too much on our plate to be concerned about others, but that we have too much on our plate +because+ we are not concerned about others. This need not be taken on anyone's advice - it is something we can consider in relation to our experiences of everyday life. As we reflect on these possibilities, and perhaps progressively erode our faith in the delusive happiness of self-centred living, we may well find ourselves naturally seeking out opportunities to benefit others. Motivation is not a problem for anyone who accepts the extraordinary truth contained in Yeshe Aro's ancient prescription for happiness: "On this depends my liberation: to assist others - nothing else." --- Um, seems that the author's credit for the above was edited out somehow? It is from Medialens. ---- Re: "Lurkers should be outed" - is that 'outed' or 'ousted'? How can either be done? The wiki is available to the entire reading universe at large, so potentially anyone is a lurker. Not sure what if anything can be done about lurkers on a public page? -- joyce %%%***_***&&&***%%%***_***&&&***%%%***_***&&&***%%%***_***&&&*** VERY very interesting art(icle)! :-) Have you tried a link? :-) er, and - joy, i learned early on that all one can do about lurker/predators is to shine them on? unLESS - will they RIP us OFF??? i spose they COULD... like - we can ONLY do SO much in our minds to help people, and spread "hope" (etc), without needing to be paranoic about the "possible futures" inherent withing "possible lurkers"! (possibly possible? impossibly plausible?) ;-) agrape, v ps (definitely "maybe"?) Advertising Please see wikicities:talk:advertising for news and problems about the ads which were recently added. If they appear at the top of the page, pressing ctrl and F5 should move them to the right place. Angela 22:00, 14 Jan 2005 (PST)